I was watching the Steven Seagal movie Urban Justice the other day and there was an action scene where Steven Seagal kicked a guy in the balls. It reminded me of Arkham Horror.
Ok, you're thinking. I did not start reading this board game review to have this guy talk about Steven Seagal movies and balls. And I agree it's not a typical start. But give me a chance to explain.
So: Urban Justice. Steven Seagal plays a guy whose son is killed, and he is looking for the killer. As often happens in Steven Seagal movies, he gets in fights with dudes. And in one of these fights, he kicks a guy in the balls. And then kicks him again, and again, and again. It was crazy. I sat there watching the screen in open-mouthed amazement. Just when I thought it was over, WHAM! Another set of lace-marks to the sack. Steven Seagal kicks a guy in the balls ELEVEN TIMES IN A ROW.
Now I love a good ball-kicking. I grew up in the Eighties where groin trauma was a national pastime. If you were the antagonist in an Eighties comedy, you were probably going to take one to the taint, usually at the climax of the film. Eighties comedies always had these endings: the underdogs win and the bad guys end up doubled over at the prom or during the big game or whatever, holding their crotch and making an exaggerated, "Ouch! My balls!" face while everyone laughs at them. To which I say: Sorry, school bully and/or snooty preppie, but that's life. Even The Wolfman wasn't safe from a good bag-bonk back then.
But there's such a concept as "too much of a good thing". Steven Seagal kicking a guy in the balls eleven times in a row definitely qualifies. For starters, having to kick a dude 11 times in the sack makes me doubt Seagal's basic competency at ball-kicking. Look, I've seen America's Funniest Home Videos enough to know that even a five year old can drop a guy with a good whack to the sack. So if you need eleven kicks, not only do you lack power but you lack technique. I would have to say that, AT MOST, a person would have to kick a guy in the balls 3 times (one kick to the frank and one for each bean), and that's only if they were a super-precise Sack Sniper with virtually no power behind their toe. Even an amateur nutcracker like myself should need 2 at the outside.
But most importantly, eleven ball kicks doesn't add anything to a fight scene. The first kick is cool, you're like "dude that guy took one to the boys! Ouch!" After about the second or third kick, it loses a lot of meaning. The scene loses it's visceral quality, and the dude's yelps of pain aren't funny or exciting anymore. Pardon the expression, but it ceases to make an impact.
Now this brings me around to Arkham Horror. Arkham Horror is a pretty good cooperative game with a decent narrative where you roam around the board, closing portals and fighting or avoiding monsters. You'll probably enjoy it the first couple of times you play it. And you'll notice that there are a lot of expansions for it, and you might be tempted to buy one. Well, look out buddy. Because those expansions are a lot like Steven Seagal kicking you in the balls. There can be too many and it can drag down the experience without really adding anything.
As with all my reviews I assume that you have read other reviews of Arkham Horror and are somewhat familiar with the rules and components.
Theme
I am going to start with this first because everyone talks about how much they love the theme of this game. Well I am going to be a bit of a contrarian on this one. The theme of Arkham Horror really let me down. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine theme overall, But it's link to "Lovecraftian Adventure" is pretty tenuous. Now I want to take it a moment here to say, I am not an H.P Lovecraft fanboy. People loooove H.P. Lovecraft's writings, but not me. I really enjoy his worlds, but his writing is a bit stilted for me. Still, you got to give old H.P. credit for the whole, "Real horror is knowing you don't matter" theme and the amount of creepy world-building that went on in his short stories. It's a tried and true setting that has been used (or misused - more on this in a minute) for a couple of really good RPGs, so we know the theme works as the basis for a game. Unfortunately, the theme of Arkham Horror is quite the opposite of the Lovecraftian "you are insignificant" theme and the moody psychological horror that accompanies it. In Arkham Horror, you are quite significant. The world (and the game) is quite literally going to end unless you run around the city and close Gates to Another Dimension that are cropping up everywhere. You pick your character, who can be a gangster or a hobo or a nun or a professor of the occult, and get to work. To be honest it sounds like something out of the Twilight Zone. And I should love silly shit like this. Unfortunately that description on the cover, "Lovecraftian Adventure", keeps eating at me. This game's theme doesn't embody that phrase. It's like if you bought a game that claimed to be about city planning, and it was actually about managing the employees in town hall. Sure, I mean the trappings of city planning are there, and dealing with town hall staffing is part of city planning, but it's not really inimical to the genre. In my experience, when someone talks about city planning they expect to be zoning areas, not hiring property inspectors.
I guess my problem with this game's theme is that it is not a reflection of Lovecraftian literature. It's a reflection of Call of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game based on Lovecraftian literature. So it's double-distorted. Now maybe you don't know what I am talking about when I bring up Call of Cthulhu. Well, let me elaborate a bit. Call of Cthulu is a roleplaying game set in the Lovecraftian mythos. The game was first published in 1981, so it's been around a long time and is very popular. I've been playing it for about 20 years on and off and in my experience, Call of Cthulhu roleplaying games feature stories that tend to be a lot pulpier than Lovecraft stories, because the players know that they are in a Lovecraft universe (even if their characters don't) and so tend to be much more cautious. (Being gamers, they also tend to be more heavily armed.) And also, gamer personality types come into play. So what you end up with is a sort of weird combination of gaming tropes and Lovecraftian horrors.
Now, it's not surprising that Arkham Horror is based off the tropes of Call of Cthulhu. Hell, it has the Call of Cthulhu logo in the corner of the box, and it was originally published in 1987 by the same people who published Call of Cthulhu. So I would have to be pretty dumb to act surprised about the similarities. It's just a little disappointing. And I hate to say it, but it brings up a problem that I have been seeing for a while: the world "Lovecraftian" becoming synonymous with "Call of Cthulhu", which is a very limited, super-pulpy take on the Mythos. But most of Lovecraftian writings have no resemblance to what takes place in Call of Cthulhu. Oftentimes, Call of Cthulhu is horror pulp with a sanity pool. It's not nearly as moody, weird, labyrinthine, or -- let's face it here -- original as it's source material. When Call of Cthulhu came out it was relatively young in the life of RPGs, and it had a huge number of influences from the biggest game in town, Dungeons and Dragons. Some of it's mechanics did not work for adventures as written, yet were carried over. Some of it's mechanics were developed better by games that came after it, for example the sanity system in the RPG Unknown Armies. So it's sad that the tropes of Call of Cthulhu game, and not the original writings on which it is based, are making it into our collective gaming culture.
Look, I'm not stupid. A "straight Lovecraft" game would be a hell of a design challenge, because so much of an H.P. Lovecraft story takes place in the protagonist's headspace. And board games are not, as a rule, going to get scares or even minor chills, so it's not like I'm pissed off because Arkham Horror isn't scary. In fact, the only tabletop game I've played that even gave me the creeps was Dread, a roleplaying game. And that only worked because the GM did a hell of a lot of work establishing tone (we played in a storage room that he had decorated in plastic, Dexter style, with construction lighting), and the limited mechanics are basically made to build tension and suspense. So I know that what I am asking for is a tall order. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're going to throw around "Lovecraftian" on a box, shouldn't it mean something more than a horror game with a sanity pool? Or is that what people want? I just feel like H.P. Lovecraft would look at this game, with monsters running around in the streets and magic spells and a hobo with a shotgun and dimensional gates shooting up all over the place, and be like, "Uh you guys know my stories are about a world that, on the surface, APPEARS normal? Right?" I dunno, maybe I'm being a neckbeard about this.
Having said that, the pulpy horror theme works fine and is richly integrated into the board, the cards, and the player aids. This is a nice looking game with good production quality. I don't know if I'd call it "Lovecraftian Adventure", though.
Gameplay
I have been playing Arkham Horror with 2 different groups for 3 years. Initially, both groups started with the base game. At this point, I thought Arkham Horror was a moderately fun co-op game. I liked the fact that there was no dedicated "bad guy" player, and I liked the fact that the game tended to ramp up the frantic level as the game progressed. It had enough good qualities that I felt I could recommend it.
Then came the expansions. And, as with all games, repetition makes the bad elements stand out more. So 3 years later, I would not recommend this game as a purchase. I would say that if you had a chance to play it for the first time with only the base game or one expansion, you should try it out. But overall it's not worth owning.
My first negative toward Arkham Horror is my feeling that the game doesn't have a lot of interactivity with the other players, even though you are all working against the game's system. You are kind of off in your own world for a good portion of the game. Sure, you might meet up with another player a couple of times to use your special ability to help them or trade equipment, or have them take care of a monster for you. But overall you don't feel like you are "in the same boat" with them. Whenever we would lose the game, none of us felt that our individual contributions had mattered; we'd felt like we'd had a "tough setup" or that variance had gotten the better of us. I think a good co-op game should have a moment where you point at your friend's wife and scream, "Well we might have won if she wasn't so stupid!" Just kidding, but I think you get my sentiment -- that you should feel like players have an influence on the game and that there are "critical moments" when you all have to come together and make it happen. That rarely happens in Arkham Horror.
The second problem I have experienced, and I alluded to back at the beginning of the review with my Steven Seagal ball-kicking story, is that Arkham Horror's many expansions, when used together, degrade the fun of the game. You have to moderate your use of them, which is not immediately obvious to someone who is purchasing them with the intent of, "the more of these I get, the better the game will be." That hasn't been my experience at all. With one expansion in play, Arkham Horror is fun and usually better. With two it's a more chaotic game, but still can be entertaining. With three, it's a bloated, worthless mess. How? it's best if I just list the why of it here:
1) The new rules in the expansions frequently follow a "debt" rule model. That is to say, if they give you short term advantage, they give you a long-term disadvantage, or vice-versa. Do you want to join a cult? In the short term it will give you an advantage, but in the long term a disadvantage. Do you want to complete a job? It will give you a short term disadvantage for a reward. Take a injury or madness card instead of dying, and it's a short term advantage for a long-term disadvantage. Ignore the Kingsport gates for a short-term advantage and long-term disadvantage. I know that many rules in games boil down to some form of risk-reward management, but Arkham Horror is just so damn blatant about it.
2) The expansions, almost as a rule, make the game harder or at least more swingy. Run too many of them and there's so many variables in play that you can have a really easy game or an impossibly difficult one, based on nothing more than chance. I like randomness, but Arkham Horror with too many expansions hits the tipping point. It becomes a chaotic mess.
3) The core of Arkham Horror gameplay is closing or sealing gates. This is the primary win condition. The secondary win condition is to defeat the big monster that comes through the gates at the end of the game, in a fight that should be heavily stacked against the players. Only 3 of the expansions effect these conditions in any form. One of them makes the Gates have an additional effect. One of them makes the end battles a little more unpredictable and interesting. And one makes it impossible to permanently seal gates. None of them affect the mechanics of sealing gates at all. You still enter the space with the gate, go through, enter a special space where you draw 2 cards over 2 turns, and then pop back to try to seal the gate. This never changes and a good portion of your game will be spent in these special spaces and you know what? There's absolutely no changes to this process, ever, in any expansion. Go in the gate and draw 2 cards and come out and perform a skill check. It never changes.
4) Arkham Horror can be a little bit fiddly even with the base game. With the expansions, it becomes a "Whoops! I forgot..." game. There are just too many triggered effects and too many cards and variables on the table. Every turn you start to make a mistake. "Whoops! I forgot I should have gotten some money when Pete cashed in that gate trophy, because we're business partners. Whoops! I forgot that there's a mythos card that affects this combat result. Whoops! I forgot to roll for my bank loan. Whoops! I forgot to apply my madness card/apply that Herald's effect/remember that the stores are closed from the terror track." There's just too much to keep track of consistently.
5) Earlier I mentioned the lack of player interactivity. It becomes even worse when the board is expanded. I didn't even cross the space of another investigator at all during one game (played with both Dunwitch and Kingsport).
6) More expansions = more things to consider on a player's turn = longer turns = more downtime for everyone else.
Now I've played the game in too many combinations to tell you which expansions are good ones, and which are not, but I can tell you that adding more than 2 to your game is not a good idea. Which, with there being 7 and all, is pretty limiting.
Another problem I feel with the game I mentioned in item number #3 above is that you spend too much time in a mechanically uninteresting area, which is traveling through other dimensions to close gates. This is basically an automated move-and-draw-cards step for your character. It's totally random, and you don't make any interesting decisions while this is happening other than the decision to adjust your character's statistics (which is a gamble, because there's no telling what statistic a given card draw will ask you to use). The more I played Arkham Horror, the more aggravated I got with this particular mechanic -- losing your autonomy is dull regardless of what someone is reading off of a card.
The last thing I want to talk about regarding Arkham Horror's gameplay is it's biggest failure, and that's the amount of gambles in the game and how they are handled. You're always gambling in Arkham Horror - should I attack this monster and possibly lose health and sanity? Should I change my stats around to have a better chance of succeeding under certain conditions? And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with systems that use randomness. But Arkham Horror just leaves too much to chance and, too often, does not have interesting stakes on the gambles. There's a point where a game crosses the line into being a "dicefest" and Arkham Horror is purely in this territory. There are just too many times where your turn ends up being, "which of these random events should I subject myself to?" with no clear idea of what the outcome will be if you win or lose. Do you go to the shop, fight the monster, or have an encounter at The Docks? Fight the monster: you might get a monster trophy or you might get punched in the face, depending on how the dice come up. Go to the shop: you might get something good at the shop or it might be Antiques Roadshow Day and nothing good is for sale, depending on your draw. Go to the Docks: draw a card, anything might happen. For all I know my character will end up fighting a bum for a clue token. It just feels capricious and slapdash all the time, where you can't really plan anything or make a long term strategy. You're constantly reacting to the variance and while this can be fine (I don't enjoy games that are 100 percent procedural) when your choice is to roll the dice one way or roll the dice another way or roll the dice a third way for slightly different losses or gains it starts to blur together. Arkham Horror tends to "chip away" at the player's resources, so oftentimes the stakes on any individual roll aren't very exciting; it's only when you're on your last Health or Sanity point that the outcomes of the rolls become interesting.
Despite really liking Arkham Horror when I first started playing it, the game has not held up.
Components and Narrative
One of the greatest strengths of table-top board games is the fact that they are a social experience, and this experience is greatly heightened by a narrative that can be discussed both during and after the game. In this element, Arkham Horror really shines.
The actual bolt-on narrative elements provided by the text on the cards are actually pretty weak, since there's simply not a lot of space on the cards for text. Also, the fact that each piece of text must stand alone means that the cohesiveness suffers. A little bit of a counterbalance to this is that the cards are tied to particular locations on the board which is nice -- when you visit the Docks you're going to get a card that will specifically mention the foggy waterfront. Thematically and narratively, that's a nice package.
Where the game really shines, though, is the interaction of the various spells, equipment pieces, and conditions that end up on your character. It gets ridiculous pretty quickly. You end up with nuns on motorcycles, performing drive-bys with shotguns on zombies. Or kleptomaniac professors of the occult who just HAVE to deliver packages around the neighborhood to make a few bucks before the end of the world. Or a street magician slowly going insane from trying to fight a flying polyp with magic in the middle of the street. Or some other equally absurd combination. It can be a lot of fun, conceptually, and a great distraction from some of the tedium of the gameplay. I've found that I enjoy discussing what happened during a game of Arkham Horror far more than playing it.
Another item I wanted to mention is the components. They look great. Arkham Horror is a great looking game on the table and that's certainly part of the appeal of boardgames. A big part of this game's Lovecraftian influence is found in it's excellent and moody art -- and in this respect, it is flawless. However, as with all Fantasy Flight Games, the box insert is garbage and you're either going to end up with a tackle box or a zillion little plastic baggies, which increases setup time by A TON.
Sum It All Up, Man
Now that I think about it, Arkham Horror is a lot like Steven Seagal. Both started out and were very successful. Both have gotten very bloated since they originally appeared on the scene. Both have weird spin-offs (Steven Seagal plays blues guitar, and Arkham Horror has Mansions of Madness aka Spookhouse Descent). Both have good qualities and big flaws. Both have been very popular in their fields, but interest has waned somewhat recently.
Here's something funny that I wanted to talk about: after 2 years of playing Arkham Horror I got a chance to play Pandemic and was totally happy with it. Don't get me wrong, Pandemic is not as thematic, not as narratively satisfying, has worse components and sometimes feels like there's only one correct move a turn. However, it does a good job of getting a group around a table together, working at a common goal and talking with each other far more effectively than Arkham Horror, is easier to setup and tear down, and is much shorter, so it doesn't dominate an evening. And I wanted to talk about Pandemic in this summary but then I asked myself, "Ok, how are you going to make this analogy work for Steven Seagal? Who is the Pandemic of Steven Seagal's career?" And then I realized it was Vin Diesel. Think about it. They are similar (both always play characters that don't talk much, are arrogant, beat people up, and glare at everyone a lot) in some core ways while being different (i.e. being tall vs. short, having hair vs. bald, having a soft voice vs. harsh gravelly voice, being a bad actor vs. being a good one, etc.) cosmetically. But their substance is similar. Think about a Steven Seagal role, and I bet Vin Diesel could play it very well, or vice versa. And just like Pandemic, Vin Diesel came onto the scene after Steven Seagal and got more popular than him. So I am able to keep my Steven Seagal analogy! Steven Seagal is Arkham Horror, and Vin Diesel is Pandemic. Yeah, I think that works.
Thanks for reading.
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